A justice who frequently struggles to see injustice and cruelty in the present will surely struggle to see injustice and cruelty in the past.
A reflection on the utter absurdity of Neil Gorsuch, nitwit justice of the Supreme Court. “Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” Gorsuch elaborates on the point: “Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale” and “Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes.” They shuttered businesses and schools, he continues, and “threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too.”
Now, there obviously was — and still is — a debate to have about the extent of the state, local and federal response to Covid-19, which killed more than 1.1 million people in the United States between March of 2020 and May of 2023 and remains among the leading causes of death. But do those measures have a chance of representing the “greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country?”
Consider the competition. Were Covid restrictions a greater intrusion on civil liberties than the forced sterilization of more than 70,000 Americans under the eugenic policies of state and local governments across the country from the 1920s through the 1970s?
The mass surveillance of thousands of Americans involved in liberal and left-wing politics by the federal government during the 1960s?
The McCarthyite purges of thousands of Americans accused of “un-American activities” in the 1950s?
The “Palmer Raids” of 1919 and 1920, in which federal agents arrested thousands of Americans on flimsy evidence with plans to deport them from the country?
That’s just the 20th century.
When we look back to the 19th century, we see even more egregious peacetime assaults on the rights and liberties of Americans. Beginning in the 1890s, for example, Southern legislatures began to strip voting and civil rights from huge swaths of their states’ populations. Then there’s labor conflict. In 1877 alone, state, local and federal strikebreakers killed more than 100 people engaged in strikes and protests against railroads across the country.
